Zoological Garden I

Macke painted this at the Munich zoo in 1912, the year he travelled to Paris and met Robert Delaunay, whose work had colour behaving almost like music. You can see what he took from it. The animal pens and Sunday visitors dissolve into blocks of cobalt, orange, and acid green laid down flat, with barely any shading. Parrots, flamingos, and a deer share the space with couples in their good clothes, everyone folded into the same bright screen of colour. Macke was 25 and had just found the manner that would define him. He painted several more views of the same zoo before 1914, when he was killed in the opening weeks of the First World War, at 27.